Irish contemporary poet Eavan Boland mounts the starting point of her poetry to a very practical issue of how to imagine women’s lives inside Irish history. Given E. H. Carr’s modern notion of the ‘historiography’ of history, history that used to record the progress in the public sphere can be regarded as masculine. And in such masculine history women, who have often been associated with Nature due to their biological function, have never been imagined as active contributors to historical progress. Likewise, Irish women’s domestic experiences have been discarded as worthless while Irish men’s public experiences have been integrated to the progress of Irish history. Troubled by the fact that Irish women's lived experiences have been silenced in Irish history, Boland has been exploring the possibility of eroticizing such masculine history and creating a livable space for real-life Irish women in her poetry. Therefore in this essay I'll look into Outside History (1990) among her many books of poems published since 1962. Outside History, which comprises of three parts, is especially significant in her poetic career because in it Boland’s individual and communal concerns as a woman and woman poet are intricately woven and expanded to the issue of the historiography of Irish history. Specifically, I will examine how Boland engages in a very creative project of diving into Irish history and emerging with a body of lived experiences of women that have been silenced and treated as non-existence. I will also illuminate the fact that Boland’s erotics of history suggests a new alternative way of writing political poetry in Ireland. Ultimately, I aim to show that Boland, not by romanticizing past women in a new myth and legend but by etching out an original poetic space, has successively swerved from the formidable influence of W. B. Yeats and become a representative poet of her own.

• 한지희(이화여대) | Han, Jihee